The old saying declares "you can't go home again." Well, I think I may have proved that's not necessarily true, even if the trip lasts just a small part of an afternoon.
My original hometown was Glendora, Calif., a small city 26 miles east of Los Angeles in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
When I saw the NAHAD Annual Convention was in San Diego this year, I got a bit excited. I could visit two of my closest friends out there, and also take a quick trip to Glendora.
My life in Glendora was short by any measurement. My parents were from Ohio, but they moved west in 1958. My dad, then working in sales for General Tire, took a transfer, hoping the new locale would help my brother's battle with allergies.
My sister and I were both born in Glendora. We lived in a neighborhood where many of the families had kids our ages, and we were all extremely close. When my parents decided in 1968 to move back home to Ohio, it was a shock to our world.
That was before the era of connectivity. We did return two years later, renting a house in the neighborhood for a month that summer.
Facebook helped reconnect a few of us in recent years. That led to a good lunch catching up during NAHAD with Joe Finkbiner, one of our childhood friends who now lives outside San Diego.
I couldn't make any connections for my afternoon trip to Glendora. Still, I couldn't resist driving up and walking the old neighborhood, a place I hadn't been in 30 years. While viewing our old house, I called my brother, who remembers everyone's addresses, even five decades later.
Joe told me that my best friend from childhood—Lee Spengler—was a teacher at the high school, and lived in the house he grew up in. There was a pickup truck in the driveway, but I didn't plan to knock on the door.
But then a younger girl exited the house—possibly a granddaughter—and walked out to the truck, followed by a man my age. When I tried to get his attention, he looked at me like I was trying to sell him something.
I said, "Are you Lee Spengler?" He replied, "Yes. Who are you?"
"I'm Bruce Meyer," I said, not knowing what type of response I'd get after 54 years of no contact. But Lee shook his head, saying, "Oh my God."
He was on his way somewhere, so we only had 10 minutes to talk. Lee asked what I was doing in town. I explained I had been in San Diego at a work conference, that I was editor of a publication that covered tire and rubber product manufacturing. He said, "Your dad was in the tire industry, wasn't he?" I was amazed Lee remembered that detail from when we both were 8.
We had to part too soon. There were none of the hard-to-keep promises to keep in touch like when we were kids. But for that one day, just that bit of connection was enough. I decided maybe, you can go home again.
Meyer is editor of Rubber News and remains a lifetime Dodgers fan. Contact him at [email protected].
